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Cops get help with words

As police across the country struggle with skyrocketing mental health emergency calls, frontline OPP officers now are equipped with a standard form to help them more efficiently deal with mental health calls.

The form — developed by Londoner Ron Hoffman — aims to help officers assess mental health situations using medical terms that will ultimately make for a quicker hand-off at the hospital.

“Language itself will help as a bridge between the systems,” said Hoffman, an instructor and mental health trainer at the Ontario Police College. “Police officers see some pretty bizarre stuff out there and they don’t know how to capture it in words . . . We are helping them put it into words.”

And that helps triage staff and doctors assess the patient more quickly, which in turn gets the officers out of emergency departments more quickly, said Barb Pizzingrilli, manager of ­mental health programs for Niagara Health System.

Along with other measures geared toward cutting down wait times for mental health patients, Niagara piloted the project last year with police and saw a drastic change.

Last month, police officers dealing with mental health calls spent an average of 48 minutes in emergency department waiting rooms, down from to 3.2 hours in 2009, she said.

“Before, police might say ‘the patient is acting in a strange manner’ or ‘inappropriately’ and now (for example) it’s ‘the person is having hallucinations,’” said ­Pizzingrilli.

Such medical terminology would signal a triage nurse to have a doctor see the patient sooner.

With the adoption of the new screener, OPP officers across Ontario will be trained on how to use the new form, how to recognize certain indicators of mental health breakdowns and how to articulate those symptoms best for medical staff.

The OPP doesn’t know how many of its 700,000 calls last year were mental health calls.

London police say mental health calls rose by 40% last year and officers dealt with an average of seven such calls a day.

Police across Canada have been urging more mental health supports to help people before they’re in crisis and 911 is called.

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WHAT THEY SAID

Insp. Bill Chantler said city police have developed a protocol based on a form similar to the OPP’s, but created by London Health Sciences Centre: “The form helps police explain to the health-care people what they observed and what led them to apprehend the person under the Mental Health Act,” he said.